Retro Browser War: IE6 Vs. Netscape In 2011

jbrodkin writes "What if you took the raw, pre-patched, 10-year-old versions of Internet Explorer 6 and Netscape 6.1 and tried to surf the modern Web? What would happen? You might think firing up IE6 or Netscape would lead to an immediate onslaught of viruses, but just for fun, I decided to spend some time using these two ancient browsers. It turns out IE6 is still capable of surfing much of the modern Internet, and can play Flash and Java content, but Netscape's troubles show it probably died a justified death."

Netscape 6+

[Dracos]

After AOL bought Netscape, they decided to keep the Netscape browser on life support (but strangle it anyway) by releasing versions 6.0 and later, which were cut from the maturing Mozilla 5 codebase:

• Netscape 6.0 = Mozilla .5
• Netscape 6.1 = Mozilla .9
• Netscape 6.2 = Mozilla .9
• Netscape 7.0 = Mozilla 1.1
• Netscape 7.1 = Mozilla 1.4
• Netscape 7.2 = Mozilla 1.7
• Netscape 8.0 = Mozilla 1.7

At this point (May 2005) Netscape was irrelevant, as Firefox had taken over among the tech savvy, and word was spreading beyond us. Also, AOL had seen fit to saddle Netscape with ugly, ad-infested themes.

The 6x and 7x lines were premature at best, almost as if they were designed to nail the brand's coffin shut, which they did.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_timeline [wikipedia.org], and my own memory of the time.

Re:Or possibly...

[Shikaku]

Because then you can retract your statements and game modding up for nefarious reasons. Slashdot has permaposting for a good reason.

There's a reason why it's preview then post button.

Re:Or possibly...

[w_dragon]

They thought of that. He went to great lengths to get a version of IE6 that was released in 2001, no patches allowed. It's in the first page of the article. I know, I must be new here.

Re:Or possibly...

[Waccoon]

I just did a clean install of Win2K (IE 5.5) under VM, and put on Netscape 4 for fun. The results weren't pretty. IE 5.5 did pretty well on my sites which made no accommodations for IE at all. Netscape regularly showed blank pages because it choked on the CSS, and some perfectly valid code even made the browser crash.

This perfectly reflects my experience when I was in college. I stopped using Netscape because it was a slow, cranky, crash-prone piece of junk, especially on the Mac. People have fond memories thanks to the nostalgic factor. In reality, Netscape 4 was a direct response to the IE monopoly panic, and the company screwed up big time. They killed themselves.

Apparently, I'm alone in my memories that Netscape wasn't that great a product, thus making it part of yet another VHS vs Betamax.

Re:Obvious

[foobsr]

Remember this thing came out nearly a decade ago and those "web standards" you fellas like so much really didn't exist as anything more than proposals at the time, most of which were completely changed after IE 6 had already been released.

I disagree. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML#HTML_version_timeline [wikipedia.org]

CC.